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Notes on the Cultural Revolution in China
By Stephen Cheng (adapted from this blog entry posted on January 11, 2015: http://assorted-
writings.blogspot.com/2015/01/notes-on-chinese-cultural-revolution.html )
What happened in the People’s Republic of China (acronym: PRC) when the Cultural Revolution
(acronym: CR) took place from 1966 to 1976?
In the bluntest terms possible, the period was one of utter mayhem, chaos, destruction, mass
murder, etc. At the behest of Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-tung/毛泽东/毛澤東, the leading and most
prominent Stalinist in the People's Republic of China, the up-and-coming young generation at
that time as well as others became the infamous, violent Red Guards/红卫兵/ 紅衛兵 who
pillaged, tortured, rampaged, and murdered. They found, denounced, tortured and killed
those suspected of being "capitalist roaders." They destroyed works of classical, ancient Chinese
culture (e.g. works of Confucius/孔夫子) and modern Western culture (e.g. sheet music
of Ludwig van Beethoven's work) alike. "Rustification" campaigns occurred, or rather continued,
as well. Dissidents, whether suspected or real, and Red Guards, either of their own accord or
after having fallen out of favor with the PRC's leaders, as well as others found themselves in the
countryside where they worked on communes, essentially collective farms.
How did the country manage to stay together during and after the CR?
The regime retained control via means like the military throughout the CR. As for the aftermath,
soon after the mid-1970s, after Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese
government under Deng Xiaoping/Teng Hsiao-ping/邓小平/鄧小平 moved towards neoliberal
economic reforms (also known as 改革开放/改革開放/Gǎigé kāifàng. The English-language
translation: "Reform & Opening Up"), thus leading to the China that we know of today: An up-
and-coming world power in diplomatic, political, and economic terms. The country did not break
down into anarchy, civil war, etc. All things considered, it went through a miraculous (or near-
miraculous) about-turn.
How did the political left, more precisely the New Left, interpret the CR?
Outside of the People's Republic of China, the New Left was on the rise in the Western nation-
states. 1968 was a major year, for starters. France, Portugal, Italy, the United States and other
"Western" countries were lit aflame with rebellion as workers and students took to the streets.
Leftist politics became reborn.
This was thus a time when anti-imperialist movements for national self-determination were
actively fighting for political and economic independence--these movements generally wedded
nationalism with socialism. Geographic points of reference include Vietnam (namely, the
Vietnam War), Cuba (the 1959 revolution led by Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Fidel Castro),
Cambodia, Laos, northern Ireland (after violent Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist repression of the
nonviolent Catholic civil rights movement led to the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican
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Army and the onset of the Troubles that lasted from the late 1960s into the late 1990s), Palestine
(after 1967 when Western leftists dropped their support for Israel after the country consolidated
itself as a Western-allied regional power in the Middle East which in the late 1940s,
ironically, received support from the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin), Tanzania, Angola,
Mozambique, South Africa (apartheid and the African National Congress), Ghana (Kwame
Nkrumah), Iran (the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, the forthcoming 1979 revolution
that led to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Kurdistan (the Kurds, a stateless population
like the Palestinians, who dealt with exclusion and repression from the Turkish, Iraqi, and
Iranian governments), etc. "Third Worldism" was thus a prominent, popular ideology among
leftists throughout the world.
In such a context, "Maoism" (in the original Mandarin Chinese, 毛泽东思想/毛澤東思想/Máo
Zédōng Sīxiǎng, which directly translates into "Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-tung Thought" or "the
Thought of Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-tung." Both translations have appeared in print.) became very
popular. Key examples from the 1960s and 1970s include France (especially the leftist
intelligentsia, consisting of people like Alain Badiou and the nouveaux philosophes who made a
sharp turn to the right, thus abandoning Maoism in particular and leftist politics in general), West
Germany, the US, the Philippines, and Peru (Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path). Today, Maoists
remain active in Peru (and possibly in Ecuador) and they are also active in India and Nepal.
Returning from the above digression, which was for contextual reasons, Maoism was considered
by leftists to be an insurgent, revolutionary ideology and therefore the People's Republic of
China was a source of inspiration for anti-imperialist politics and the construction of a socialist
society. Accordingly, Maoists viewed the Cultural Revolution as an emancipatory act led by
Mao and carried out by the Red Guards so as to prevent "capitalist restoration" and preserve the
Chinese road to socialism.
What does the literature on the CR indicate?
The CR literature I collected mostly consists of memoirs. Other sources I obtained are general
historical accounts (or they contain such accounts while also focusing on other periods in 20th
century Chinese history).
The writers of the memoirs share similar experiences. Key similarities include:
1) some of the Red Guards who escaped China and wrote memoirs were in their teens or early
twenties;
2) they were, sooner or later, sent to the countryside;
3) they saw the chance of being Red Guards as an opportunity to move up the bureaucratic
ladder in Mao's PRC (a true irony); and
4) that they got in trouble, for instance, by making off-hand remarks deemed to be treasonous
(and thus they saw prison time, time in the concentration camps, or time in the countryside), for
being in the wrong place in the wrong time (or, maybe more precisely, doing the wrong thing at
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the wrong time), etc.
In at least two memoirs I read, the concepts of "revolutionary bloodlines" and "good/bad family
backgrounds" were also commonplace, in which lineage makes one either politically "reliable"
or suspect. Granted, the people who became Red Guards were numerous, so I have few doubts
that the memoirists who were once Red Guards had experiences that were actually fairly
common.
All in all, though, the key, general similarity is the fact that each and every one of these writers
saw the CR as a period of chaos and repression.
An overview of the historical accounts
As for historical accounts, the first Western writer to publish an exposé on the CR was the late
Pierre Ryckmans, better known by his pen name Simon Leys, a Belgian Sinologist.
Ryckmans/Leys published Les habits neufs du président Mao in 1971. It underwent two more
printings in 1972 and 1975, which gives one an idea as to how important this book became for
public knowledge about the CR. Furthermore, while exposing the CR as a scandalous affair by
Mao, it also scandalized, and deeply infuriated, Maoists in the West, especially those in France.
The publishing house Allison & Busby brought out an English-language edition, titled The
Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution in the United Kingdom in 1977,
republishing it yet again in 1981 but this time making it available in the US as well.
In this account, Ryckmans/Leys argued that the Cultural Revolution was in fact a power struggle
among two factions within the Stalinist-Maoist bureaucracy with Mao and Lin Biao/林彪 on one
side and Liu Shaoqi/刘少奇/劉少奇 on the other. This perspective was in stark contrast to the
viewpoint of people like the late William Hinton.
Hinton, at the time, echoed the general Maoist "line" on the CR in two of his books: Hundred
Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University and Turning Point in China: An
Essay on the Cultural Revolution. Namely, the CR was a struggle by Mao, Lin Biao, and the
Chinese people against the "capitalist restoration" efforts of Liu Shaoqi and his cohorts. Along
the way, efforts were underway in Chinese agriculture and industry to bring together the
"practical" and the "theoretical" and thus overcome the “red” vs. “expert” dichotomy.
Hinton also documents rather bloody fighting between student Red Guards on one side and
workers and soldiers on the other at Tsinghua University/清华大学/清華大學.
Commonalities in the Hinton and Ryckmans/Leys accounts: the growing factional rifts within the
PRC government over issues such as “red” vs. “expert,” observations of the violence that
occurred, the rise and repression of an “ultra-left”/”extreme left.”
Yet another interesting study is Han Dongping’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and
Change in a Chinese Village. In this pro-Maoist account, which is not uncritical of Mao either,
Han argues that at least in the rural areas, health care and education underwent improvement and
villages developed genuine grassroots democratic systems, thus pointing to a "positive" side of
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the CR. Given that the "focus" of the CR appeared to be in the cities, according to
Ryckmans/Leys at least, I have wondered if these socioeconomic and political advances
occurred in spite of or regardless of other CR-related occurrences (although Han would disagree
with this conclusion). So long as the people making these improvements did not challenge the
Maoist system as such, they could continue with what they were doing. But, to some extent, that
is speculation on my part.
Other observations:
First, Maoism was not the only ideology to gain cult-like popularity. On the Western political
right, the same occurred with classical liberalism, which people in the US refer to as
"libertarianism," especially Ayn Rand, Objectivism, Milton Friedman, and the Austrian school of
economics.
Second, although Hinton was not the only person to have written pro-Maoist accounts of the
PRC then, he stood out, and continues to stand out, as one of the more prolific and better
remembered writers on modern China's Maoist/Stalinist period. He provides extensive
background on Maoist land reform efforts in three books: Fanshen, Shenfan, and Iron Oxen. A
book on the early years of the PRC, with material on land reform and the Great Leap Forward,
appeared posthumously under the title Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese
Revolution. Finally, after the 1978 turn to neoliberalism, Hinton published a book, called The
Great Reversal: The Privatization of China 1978-1989, in the late 1980s in which he criticized
the privatization of Chinese agriculture. Orville Schell, another writer and China watcher who is
a still-living contemporary of Ryckmans/Leys and Hinton, also documents the same privatization
process in books such as To Get Rich is Glorious: China in the Eighties, in which Hinton
actually appears as an interview subject.
